The present invention relates to arrangements for treating and handling plate-shaped objects in general, and more particularly to a plate subdividing and sorting machine.
There are already known various arrangements capable of sawing or otherwise subdividing and distributing or sorting plate-shaped objects, among them such including a variegated subdividing arrangement that includes a plurality of sawing devices that perform longitudinal and transverse cuts and are thus capable of sawing a plate blank, which consists of a single plate or of a plate packet, into equally or differently wide longitudinal and transverse strips in order to obtain in this manner from the plate blank a multitude of final products that may have different sizes. In this context, it is also already known to transfer the respective subdivided plate blank onto a shiftable stripping-off tray and to provide a stripping device which is associated with the stripping-off tray and which strips the longitudinal strips of the respective subdivided plate blank in succession off transversely to the longitudinal direction of the longitudinal strips from the stripping-off tray. A distributing arrangement is then used for distributing the final products of different sizes which are obtained from the subdivided plate blanks to a plurality of roller conveyors.
One construction of the plate subdividing and sorting machine of this type is known, for instance, from the German published patent application DE-OS No. 27 02 725. In this machine, the stripping-off tray with the associated stripping arrangement is associated only with a height-adjustable lifting table onto which all of the longitudinal strips of a subdivided plate blank are shifted in each instance. The plate blanks are transferred from the lifting table via a roller conveyor to a transverse transportation carriage which is capable of moving to a plurality of roller conveyors which are arranged at a distance from each other and parallel to one another and at the ends of which there are arranged respective stacking arrangements.
In this known plate subdividing and sorting machine, the achievable cycle time, that is, the time interval at which plate blanks can be presented in succession to the variegated subdividing arrangement, is determined by the operating time of the component which operates at the slowest pace. In this previously proposed machine, such slowest component is the transverse transportation carriage and the distribution of the final products of different sizes, which are in each instance situated thereon and of which each consists of a number of superimposed final objects corresponding to the number of superimposed plates in the respective plate blank, to the various roller conveyors due to the operation of the transverse transportation carriage. More particularly, the longitudinal strips of a subdivided plate blank, which are jointly transferred to the transverse transportation carriage in each instance in the direction of their longitudinal directions and which often have different widths, frequently consist of differently long final products in each of the longitudinal strips, and these differently wide and differently long final products are to be transferred or distributed to different ones of the roller conveyors. Thus, when the respective longitudinal strip includes final products of different lengths, then this longitudinal strip cannot be transferred to the roller conveyor in a single stroke; rather, the transverse transportation carriage must be moved, to accomplish the distribution, to the different roller conveyors for the transfer of the differently long final products of the longitudinal strip to the respective roller conveyors. This results in long cycle periods.